The Copenhagen Faustparodie

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In The Roots of Coincidence, Arthur Koestler mentions that the participants at a 1932 conference on nuclear physics put on a parody of Goethe’s Faust in which Wolfgang Pauli played Mephistopheles. “His Gretchen was the neutrino, whose existence Pauli had predicted, but which had not yet been discovered.”

MEPHISTOPHELES (to Faust):

Beware, beware, of Reason and of Science
Man’s highest powers, unholy in alliance.
You’ll let yourself, through dazzling witchcraft yield
To weird temptations of the quantum field.

Enter Gretchen; she sings to Faust. Melody: ‘Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel’ by Schubert.

GRETCHEN:

My rest-mass is zero
My charge is the same
You are my hero
Neutrino’s my name.

There’s more here, including a link to the original script (in German).

| Literature · Science & Math

Lightning Rod Fashion

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In 1778, shortly after Benjamin Franklin introduced the lightning rod, Paris saw a fad for umbrellas and hats that made use of the new technology. A chain ran from the accessory down to the ground and would (in principle) carry the electricity from a lightning strike harmlessly into the ground.

I can’t find any record that such a strike ever happened. Lightning rods didn’t become popular in the United States, even to protect structures, until the 19th century.

(Thanks, Jon.)

| Oddities · Science & Math · Society

Near Miss

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I just bumbled into this: In 1978 Isaac Asimov judged a limerick contest run by Mohegan Community College in Norwich, Conn. He chose this as the best of 12,000 entries:

The bustard’s an exquisite fowl,
With minimal reason to growl:
He escapes what would be
Illegitimacy
By grace of a fortunate vowel.

It was written by retired Yale official George D. Vaill. Asimov said, “The idea is very clever and made me laugh, and the one-word fourth line is delightful.”

| Literature · Poems

Some Two

Given 52 integers, prove that it’s always possible to find some two of them whose sum or difference is evenly divisible by 100.

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

A Nose for Numbers

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In 1894 Francis Galton experimented with conducting addition and subtraction by smell. He designed an apparatus that would produce whiffs of scented air and then memorized their combinations: “I taught myself to associate two whiffs of peppermint with one whiff of camphor; three of peppermint with one of carbolic acid, and so on.”

After practicing sums using the scents themselves, he moved on to doing them entirely in his imagination. “There was not the slightest difficulty in banishing all visual and auditory images from the mind, leaving nothing in the consciousness besides real or imaginary scents. In this way, without, it is true, becoming very apt at the process, I convinced myself of the possibility of doing sums in simple addition with considerable speed and accuracy solely by means of imaginary scents.”

He had similar success with subtraction, but didn’t try multiplication. And some further experiments seemed to show that “arithmetic by taste was as feasible as arithmetic by smell.”

(Francis Galton, “Arithmetic by Smell,” Psychological Review 1:1 [January 1894], 61-62.)

| Science & Math

Podcast Episode 265: The Great Hedge of India

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Image: Wikimedia Commons

In the 19th century, an enormous hedge ran for more than a thousand miles across India, installed by the British to enforce a tax on salt. Though it took a Herculean effort to build, today it’s been almost completely forgotten. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe this strange project and reflect on its disappearance from history.

We’ll also exonerate a rooster and puzzle over a racing murderer.

See full show notes …

| History · Podcast